THE PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMY IN EVOLUTION. 339 



of the general eud, and because all rearrangements of the organic 

 parts that lead directly to the development of the eye are favored, 

 as against rearrangements tending in any other direction, by the 

 fact that every successive stage of such rearrangements results in 

 a saving of energy in the reaching of maintenance to the organ- 

 ism bringing them about. In a word, the path of structural 

 movement toward the eye is the easiest path, the path of least re- 

 sistance, while the path away from the eye is the most diflBcult 

 path, the path of greatest resistance ; and what is true of the eye 

 is true of all other organs and organic appliances whatsoever. 

 Given, therefore, the molecular forces which in some way not 

 yet understood impel the organism to display those activities of 

 maintenance which we call life, and there follow, by virtue of 

 those forces, of the character of organic matter, and of the general 

 conditions of existence, not only the intelligent adaptations which 

 make possible and facilitate maintenance, but also the gradual im- 

 provement of those adaptations which constitutes organic ascent. 

 What, finally, is the outcome ? In the biological world at the 

 present moment the great question which interests inquirers is 

 that of the meaning of intelligent adaptations. Thinkers in this 

 field no longer question the existence of intelligence in the uncon- 

 scious form ; they seek to discover what that intelligence means. 

 " What we should like to discover," says one of them in a letter to 

 the writer, " is the seat of the so-called unconscious intelligence 

 which brings about those structures which the older teleologists 

 called designed." That natural selection supplies little if any 

 material for an answer to the question is already recognized. It 

 being impossible to trace these structures to an artificer operating 

 outside, our only recourse is to look to the organism itself for the 

 power to which the fashioning of tissues and organs is due. And 

 though we can do nothing toward solving the fundamental prob- 

 lem in biology, the origin of life itself, we need not despair 

 given the fact of life taking the powers of living protoplasm 

 for granted, of comprehending something of the process by which 

 intelligent adaptations arise. For, the rest being assumed, we see 

 how from the operation of the law of least resistance all the 

 mechanisms of life result by necessity. Writ minutely in the 

 tissues of the organism the law is inscribed broadly and grandly 

 on all the features of our modern civilization. Not an activity of 

 the busy industrial life around us, whether it be due directly to 

 travail of brain or hand, or find its realization in that wonderful, 

 external side of human life the life of machinery but illustrates 

 the universal mode in which all conscious intelligence reaches its 

 end. And so also in the realm of the unconscious we have only 

 to take for granted the powers of living protoplasm, and the sim- 

 plicity as well as the exceeding beauty of the process by which 



